Page 345 - Some Dance to Remember

Some Dance to Remember 315

He never mentioned the tiny Deca bottles and the hypodermic syringes
the doctor gave him in trade for sex. Only ugly bodybuilders pay cash for
steroids.
Kick masked the truth.
Ryan dissembled.
They both lied.
They both wanted more.
Kick bent over, his butt in the air, and took the needle from Logan.
Logan wanted to take muscle farther than even Kick had imaged. Logan
persuaded Kick to up the dosage. Sticking Kick gave him a sense of power.
Kick did not say no. He watched Logan shoot himself up. He was the
handsome, dark, muscle-beast of Kick’s own private dreams. He knew
how to play “Hot Cop,” and Kick liked to get arrested. They were on a
fantasy trip of their own.
“Steroids are great,” Logan said. “They’re like injecting coke.”
“The side effects of steroids,” Solly said, “is Attitude.”
Without Ryan’s knowledge, and without his coaching, which might
have saved him, Kick passed the point of no return. His body grew too big
for his soul. His Energy dissipated, thinned, spread out through his new
bigness. He was shot full of steroids and more ruggedly handsome than
ever. He was what Ryan would later biblically call “a whitened sepulcher.”
Ryan had been mistaken. He had thought Logan to be the source of
Kick’s depression that day of the Castro Street Fair when they had lain
in the grass of the Eureka Playground. He never suspected that Kick’s
anxiety was a side effect of the steroids.
Ryan had truly believed in Kick’s magnanimity, because he truly
believed in his own. He knew his own soul, his own Energy was bigger
than his long, lean body. More than one trick had told him, “When I first
met you, I thought you were much smaller than you are.” The truth was,
Ryan’s magnanimity projected a certain power. Kick had seen that their
first night together. That was, in fact, the very reason Kick had taken up
with Ryan. “You are the richest man I know,” he had said. He meant not
in property, not in money, the way a cheap hustler might have worked the
angle, but richness of soul.
“The way,” Solly said later, “an expensive hustler works his even more
expensive angle.”
Ironically, finally, when Kick’s own muscle became larger than his
own soul, Ryan’s magnanimity became a reproach to Kick. What is
reproachful becomes something to exploit. Kick went over the edge so
subtly I think he hardly realized his fall. He was essentially a good man.

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